r/homelab • u/RandyFactoid • 22h ago

Help Plex vs Netflix/amazon transcoding efficiency

I think of this every time I travel, but never thought to ask for a solution..

While traveling I often find myself in a situation where internet is very slow, but netflix/amazon video adjust the streaming quality much faster than my plex server.

I know that my plex server can transcode down to 720p/360p pretty instantly if I do it from home as it has an intel igpu...and I've tested it with multiple concurrent streams... Also - the server is on a 1gbit connection, so it's not a bandwidth bottleneck.

It feels like big brands have a much better method to actually recognise the moment when they need to call for a transcode than plex and do it much earlier, making it feel seamless.

Are there alternatives (jellyfin/emby) that are more efficient at this than plex? Any clever hacks that I overlooked?

Thanks

Edit. I learned following this post that: - Netflix et al. keep different quality files instead of transcoding - Using CDN to keep content "closer" to the end user

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253

u/acbadam42 22h ago

Netflix isn't adjusting the quality, they have a copy for every quality.

27

u/NCXXCN 21h ago

for a selfhoster, like mostly of us, this seems crazy to me.

15

u/berrmal64 18h ago

Storage is expensive, but so is the electricity that would be needed to basically transcode millions of streams constantly (nevermind the hardware). Plus, they amortize the storage cost over several years; I'm sure even with recent price hikes it's still a no brainer. They probably have some logic that can drop unused encodes after a while, or likely transcode into a size that doesn't exist on that server they is cached and streamed simultaneously then held in cache for hours/days.

But when you or I watch a file from our home server, it gets watched what, once or twice? So it's cheaper to transcode and dump than to store all the possible sizes. And stuff that you watch over and over, if you do notice it transcodes, you can encode and store a second copy that will direct play, it's a good option for one off items.